Online Writing

On why blogs or posts don't inspire and why I should read more fiction

I read a lot, especially online, and rarely feel inspired to write the way I often do after reading fiction.

POV you are reading this post

On the rare occasion that I do get the urge to write I struggle to find my voice. I know what I want to write (vaguely, which is always the case) but what I type reads flat. As I said, with fiction, the opposite occurs and more often than not all it takes is a single page of a novel or short story to prompt me into picking up my phone or laptop in order to write a few sentences, a page, maybe more. I’m not saying the writing is good, but I don’t feel like I have a problem stepping into whatever voice or style I’ve developed for myself. I always come back later to change what’s there, but that’s beside the point. For me, there is no stepping into my voice or style after reading online writing. Why? 

Here is the required blog post time cut: my first job was as an intern in a non-existent marketing department for a bio-technology company. I guess I was the marketing department. I didn’t have much to do and would spend most of my time online. I visited Reddit so often I could eventually predict the first and second comment of a post. Not word for word, but I could tell in which posts a contradictory take would top the comment thread or when a joke would rise above the rest. Sometimes I knew what the joke would be. Not because I’m prescient, but because a lot of Reddit threads have already happened. All this without posting, too, just spending days in the weeds—my 20s were wild.

We all sound like this

But what I noticed the most was how everyone on the internet ends up kinda sorta sounding the same. All the language contained in a post feels compressed. Imagine if all music made today, major label and independent artists alike, recorded in the same room with the same engineer and same producer. That’s how online writing—especially the writing found on social media sites—can come across. I can’t help wondering if people, or users, self fulfill by reading so much online writing they then consciously or unconsciously end up writing in the same way, or, if the environment really does create that singular, anon, OP, voice. I don’t think there’s any question about online writing and its affectlessness.

Every tweet ever

Whether on a social media platform, email, blogs, forums/message boards, etc., the world of online writing typically walks hand in hand with being quick to publish at high frequency, which, to me, creates the conditions necessary for flat, less-considered language. The use of memes flattens language even more and adds to the homogeneity. Voice or style aren’t the only things that matter but I imagine that with less time to consider language and with limits on the language we have access to (when posting online), the depth of the content suffers.

Novels, on the other hand, your favourite ones anyway, are the opposite of affectless. Style, character, perspective, plot, etc., all of these things that can have very little to do with online writing (posts, blogs, etc.) draw a line in the sand. I’m being obvious now but it’s helpful to think about the differences.

(The day novels are written and published at the rate of tweets or notes will be the end of the novel altogether.¹ I would hate to be able to predict the content of a novel or see the same novel written every couple months /s ).

Beyond style, online writing can have plenty of the above, but the craft elements necessary for compelling writing face the same limitations I mentioned earlier: the need to publish fast and frequently and a platform’s interface/ identity constraints. Most online writing is written in the first person which invites a writer to lean into their main character syndrome (take this post for example), which means taking attention away from other characters (if there are any) while plots are inevitably limited by the small window of time between each post.

I know that so much of my own voice or style (especially in fiction) comes from my characters and the world I’m trying to create. What I write flows through the filters of elements like character and world which causes me to make specific choices. This character wouldn’t notice this, he wouldn’t say that, etc. Plus, the world is always present—rain, heat waves, a cubicle, the time of day, the crowd attending a trial—making the effects of these decisions compound on one another.

We need more tone/mood/voice!

These elements feel absent in much of the online world where the character is usually the author and the author is too aware of the other authors. The world (the internet) is one we know all too well which I think means a lack of imagination, mystery, tension, etc.

Online writing = the reporting of ideas. 

Novels = the exploring of ideas. 

Maybe it’s a simple question of quality. After all, novels take a long time to write and writers do their best to write timeless novels. Maybe fiction is the antidote we need against the constantly accelerating world of online writing. Have you ever ignored a post you’ve come across because it was old? What’s your threshold? A year? A month? A week? Fiction is the antithesis, novels often become more urgent, relevant, admired, or respected the longer they exist.

Novels forever undefeated

I’m not writing this now in an effort to figure out how to optimize what I read in order to optimize what I write, or to talk shit about a type of writing, but more so to report and explore the imbalance. I don’t always need to read novels, I don’t always need to write, but I do need to be aware of what’s happening when I read online writing in order to rebalance the scales, we only have so much time and so much attention after all.

1. I can’t help feeling like this post is a gateway into the AI/art conversation.